Topic: Wrestling

After 25 Royal Rumbles, you'd assume 10-15 WCW PPVs would be nothing. You'd be wrong. Following Sumo Monster Truck matches, Towers of Dooms and King of the Road contests on the back of flatbeds, things got so crazy we had to be bring in an expert.

There have been 25 Royal Rumbles. Nearly every wrestling fan has seen at least one or two, most have seen several, and a special few have seen most. Nick Bond decided to watch all of them. In order. You may call it dumb. Or masochistic. He mostly thought it was fun. And he learned a lot, too. Which is nice.

How do the pros motivate? By watching harrowing YouTube videos of 1980s professional wrestlers breathing coke-y fire. Try it! You will probably not like it very much, but it will almost certainly scare the hell out of you.

In the first of a recurring series, our intrepid assistant editor Nick Bond takes a stroll down memory lane to see if he can find a way for WWE champion CM Punk to become the face of the company without losing his identity on the way there.

New TNA champion Austin Aries has a dickishness that seems to have very little to do with his persona in the ring. But that innate dickishness—well, that and the fact that he's great at wrestling—makes him one of the most appealing champions in a long time. In a promotion that has long relied too much on puffy, bloated dinosaurs, Aries is something new.

There was nothing scripted about the recent Clay Guida-Gray Maynard fight in Atlantic City. Which made it all the more amazing that the fight, and the fighters, couldn't have followed a classic wrestling script any more perfectly.

In the lower bowl of the Richmond Coliseum sat a couple of old tatted-up hardcore guys, well into their 30s, guys who'd probably seen all kinds of acrobatic berserk-ninja mosh pit mayhem in their day, poised with the customary old-hardcore-guy rigid-back posture. They were there for Monday Night Raw, and they radiated a sense of purpose.

Kevin Steen—nicknamed Mr. Wrestling—is a pudgy Québécois dude with a patchy beard and the sort of spiky hair that only spikes because it doesn't know what else to do. He wrestles in basketball shorts and a ratty T-shirt with the sleeves torn off. He has a couple of prominent tattoos, and they are not great. He is nothing like the mulleted flex-monsters that have come to define professional wrestling. At this precise moment in American indie wrestling, he is the motherfucking man.

Promo speeches are a hugely important part of wrestling; you generally don't get to be a big star, or a beloved figure, if you can't convincingly and compellingly make the verbal case that you're ready to beat somebody's ass. One of last year's best came from the Briscoe Brothers, a pair of tatted-up skinheaded goons who have been indie fixtures for a decade.